The camping weekend at Woodland Valley Farm near Ladock was great. I haven't met Chris, the owner yet - just spoken to him on the phone a few months ago when we considered that place for the selection weekend. What a find! He's linked to the guys at Survival Matters - http://www.footstepsofdiscovery.co.uk/ and they offered us training some time ago so it was nice to hear good things about Spanner - he's spent 3 years in Borneo so should have lots of know-how that we need to absorb.
We had a great campfire although the temperature must have been close to freezing with the ice on our car roofs. Bella, the pregnant pig, was snorting away in the barn we slept in. We're hoping that we can finish off the clay stove when we go back, which will be soon. It's so efficient with only a few sticks needed to heat a couple of large pans full of water - and that's the small one that was made last time. The new one we started was about twice the size!
I'd imagine we're going to put information on small projects like this on both sites - www.fxpedition2010.com and www.expeditionborneo.org.
All of this outdoorsy stuff really gets me thinking. I've been planning what I'm going to do when I get back from Borneo, and so far, I've decided to buy a van before I go and get it ready to live in. I'll need a fuel-efficient stove/oven, and a shower and toilet. All nice DIY stuff - every guy needs a project, right? Hopefully I won't bite off more than I can chew, or I'll be very cold in 2011.
Sunday, 20 December 2009
It's building momentum!
Well here's my second post, and so much has happened! We've been on camping weekends, built fuel-efficient stoves out of clay, slept with a pregnant pig and the website's on its way. More about that now!
The website structure is finished, so now we're all filling it with content. There are going to be sections on how to plan and organise your own expedition, a massive education section that has resources for schools to learn about the important environmental aspects such as climate change and deforestation, as well as maps of Borneo, information on the cultures of indigenous people of the Kalimantan, and lots, lots more.
It will all be going on www.expeditionborneo.org when it's ready, but until then we're using another temporary domain name - www.rangersmith.co.uk.
The blog will still be the main site, and we'll link heavily into the educational website from www.fxpedition2010.com.
The audio slideshows are coming along nicely, we've found some great games and activities that we're hoping we can embed, and I've already spoken to a fair few teachers who have some great ideas.
One of which was getting together a simple pack to send to schools.
If we want to encourage schools to have fun, non-uniform days to try and raise a few pounds for the cause, we could run a competition on the website and send a prize to the school with the best jungle fancy dress or face painting.
There could be other competitions to create artwork, and the best examples get shown on the website. What about if we allow the children who will use the site to design some of the graphics to go within their pages? We should definitely have downloadable posters to advertise non-uniform days and competitions so that we're doing the time-consuming parts of organising such things as we know how busy teachers are nowadays.
The prizes for school participation could be incredibly special - like going to do a talk for the kids about our expedition, either before or after (or both?), plus phonecalls from the jungle, videos sent directly from our base camp, and I'm hoping that we can have some video conferences but we'll see about that one.
It all depends on the equipment we can afford to take, the airtime we can afford to buy and the speeds we can get from the environment we'll be in - but if we can get 100 schools to raise £500 each, then that would definitely mean that we can take some serious kit, create some amazing content and have live jungle interaction with countless schools, showing them the amazing environment we're going to be exploring. How exciting!!
The website structure is finished, so now we're all filling it with content. There are going to be sections on how to plan and organise your own expedition, a massive education section that has resources for schools to learn about the important environmental aspects such as climate change and deforestation, as well as maps of Borneo, information on the cultures of indigenous people of the Kalimantan, and lots, lots more.
It will all be going on www.expeditionborneo.org when it's ready, but until then we're using another temporary domain name - www.rangersmith.co.uk.
The blog will still be the main site, and we'll link heavily into the educational website from www.fxpedition2010.com.
The audio slideshows are coming along nicely, we've found some great games and activities that we're hoping we can embed, and I've already spoken to a fair few teachers who have some great ideas.
One of which was getting together a simple pack to send to schools.
If we want to encourage schools to have fun, non-uniform days to try and raise a few pounds for the cause, we could run a competition on the website and send a prize to the school with the best jungle fancy dress or face painting.
There could be other competitions to create artwork, and the best examples get shown on the website. What about if we allow the children who will use the site to design some of the graphics to go within their pages? We should definitely have downloadable posters to advertise non-uniform days and competitions so that we're doing the time-consuming parts of organising such things as we know how busy teachers are nowadays.
The prizes for school participation could be incredibly special - like going to do a talk for the kids about our expedition, either before or after (or both?), plus phonecalls from the jungle, videos sent directly from our base camp, and I'm hoping that we can have some video conferences but we'll see about that one.
It all depends on the equipment we can afford to take, the airtime we can afford to buy and the speeds we can get from the environment we'll be in - but if we can get 100 schools to raise £500 each, then that would definitely mean that we can take some serious kit, create some amazing content and have live jungle interaction with countless schools, showing them the amazing environment we're going to be exploring. How exciting!!
Thursday, 19 November 2009
First post!
Well well well! This is the first post to my new blog. I'm using this as a diary for the fxpedition2010 project that I'm a part of, so that I can document the whole thing for myself.
I am currently an IT technician at UCF (University College Falmouth), and as Exeter use part of the campus, I have been assigned as the Exeter IT guy - so I fix the IT problems for Exeter University users.
I read a poster several months ago advertising for an adventure, and now here I am, on the expedition team, set for Borneo in summer 2010!
It's amazing really, but I feel lucky to be a part of it and will write on here when I get the chance.
We're going to Borneo to an unexplored part of the rainforest, to discover what's there, to document that, and to educate the world with our findings. There are many more aspects to this! But I'll explain that in later posts.
For the time being, the blogsite is www.fxpedition2010.com and there's all the up-to-date info on the project. Soon there'll be an educational website up and running that we're using to keep in touch with the world - especially schools. We're going to create free resources for the classroom, and enable kids to follow us while we're trekking through the unknown!
More to follow.
Dan.
I am currently an IT technician at UCF (University College Falmouth), and as Exeter use part of the campus, I have been assigned as the Exeter IT guy - so I fix the IT problems for Exeter University users.
I read a poster several months ago advertising for an adventure, and now here I am, on the expedition team, set for Borneo in summer 2010!
It's amazing really, but I feel lucky to be a part of it and will write on here when I get the chance.
We're going to Borneo to an unexplored part of the rainforest, to discover what's there, to document that, and to educate the world with our findings. There are many more aspects to this! But I'll explain that in later posts.
For the time being, the blogsite is www.fxpedition2010.com and there's all the up-to-date info on the project. Soon there'll be an educational website up and running that we're using to keep in touch with the world - especially schools. We're going to create free resources for the classroom, and enable kids to follow us while we're trekking through the unknown!
More to follow.
Dan.
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